Combination
photo of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (R) and Russian
President Vladimir Putin.Reuters/Maxim Shemetov

Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday trust had eroded between the
United States and Russia under President Donald Trump, as Moscow
delivered an unusually hostile reception to Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson in a face-off over Syria.

Any hope in Russia that the Trump administration would herald
less confrontational relations has been dashed in the past week
after the new U.S. leader fired missiles at Syria to punish
Moscow's ally for its suspected use of poison gas.

Tillerson started a meeting with Putin in the Kremlin after
talking to his Russian opposite number Sergei Lavrov for around
three hours. The Kremlin had previously declined to confirm Putin
would meet Tillerson, reflecting tensions over the U.S. strike on
Syria.

Just as Tillerson sat down for talks with Lavrov earlier on
Wednesday, a senior Russian official assailed the "primitiveness
and loutishness" of U.S. rhetoric, part of a volley of statements
that appeared timed to maximize the awkwardness during the first
visit by a member of Trump's cabinet.

"One could say that the level of trust on a working level,
especially on the military level, has not improved but has rather
deteriorated," Putin said in an interview broadcast on Russian
television.

In his interview, Putin doubled down on Russia's support for
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, repeating denials that Assad's
government was to blame for the gas attack last week and adding a
new theory that the attack may have been faked by Assad's
enemies.

Tillerson's official itinerary in Moscow started with the meeting
with Lavrov, in an ornate hall in a foreign ministry-owned
residence. In opening remarks in front of reporters, Lavrov
greeted Tillerson with unusually icy remarks, denouncing the
missile strike on Syria as illegal and accusing Washington of
behaving unpredictably.

"I won’t hide the fact that we have a lot of questions, taking
into account the extremely ambiguous and sometimes contradictory
ideas which have been expressed in Washington across the whole
spectrum of bilateral and multilateral affairs," Lavrov said.

"And of course, that’s not to mention that apart from the
statements, we observed very recently the extremely worrying
actions, when an illegal attack against Syria was undertaken."

Lavrov also noted that many key State Department posts remain
vacant since the new administration took office -- a point of
sensitivity in Washington.

One of Lavrov's deputies was even more undiplomatic.

Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson enter a hall during their meeting in Moscow, Russia,
April 12, 2017.REUTERS/Maxim
Shemetov

"In general, primitiveness and loutishness are very
characteristic of the current rhetoric coming out of Washington.
We'll hope that this doesn't become the substance of American
policy," Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russia's
state-owned RIA news agency.

"As a whole, the administration's stance with regards to Syria
remains a mystery. Inconsistency is what comes to mind first of
all."

Tillerson kept to more calibrated remarks, saying his aim was "to
further clarify areas of sharp difference so that we can better
understand why these differences exist and what the prospects for
narrowing those differences may be."

"I look forward to a very open, candid, frank exchange so that we
can better define the U.S.-Russian relationship from this point
forward," he told Lavrov.

After journalists were ushered out of the room, Lavrov's
spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, wrote on her Facebook page that
U.S. journalists traveling with Tillerson had behaved as if they
were in a "bazaar" by shouting questions to Lavrov.

Moscow's hostility to Trump administration figures is a sharp
change from last year, when Putin hailed Trump as a strong figure
and Russian state television was consistently full of effusive
praise for him.

Cover-up

A
woman and child die after a 2013 sarin gas attack in
Syria.CBS News

The White House has accused Moscow of trying to cover up Assad's
use of chemical weapons after the attack on a town killed 87
people last week.

Trump responded to the gas attack by firing 59 cruise missiles at
a Syrian air base on Friday. Washington warned Moscow, and
Russian troops at the base were not hit.

Moscow has stood by Assad, saying the poison gas belonged to
rebels, an explanation Washington dismisses as beyond credible.
Putin said that either gas belonging to the rebels was released
when it was hit by a Syrian strike on a rebel arms dump, or the
rebels faked the incident to discredit Assad.

Trump came to the presidency promising to seek closer ties with
Russia and greater cooperation fighting against their common
enemy in Syria, Islamic State. Tillerson is a former oil
executive who was awarded Russia's Order of Friendship by Putin.

Last week's poison gas attack and the U.S. retaliation upended
what many in Moscow hoped would be a transformation in relations
between the two countries, which reached a post-Cold War low
under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.

The United States and its European allies imposed financial
sanctions on Russia in 2014 after Putin seized territory from
neighboring Ukraine.

Washington is leading a campaign of air strikes in Syria against
Islamic State fighters and has backed rebels fighting against
Assad during a six-year civil war, but until last week the United
States had avoided directly targeting the Syrian government.

Russia, meanwhile, intervened in the civil war on Assad's side in
2015 and has troops on the ground, which it says are advising
government forces. Both Washington and Moscow say their main
enemy is Islamic State, although they back opposing sides in the
wider civil war which has killed more than 400,000 people and
spawned the world's worst refugee crisis.

Reuters

In an interview with the Fox Business Network, Trump said he was
not planning to order U.S. forces into Syria, but that he had to
respond to the images of dead children poisoned in the gas
attack.

"We’re not going into Syria," he said in excerpts of the
interview on the station's website. "But when I see people using
horrible, horrible chemical weapons ... and see these beautiful
kids that are dead in their father's arms, or you see kids
gasping for life ... when you see that, I immediately called
(Defense Secretary) General Mattis."

Tillerson traveled to Moscow with a joint message from Western
powers that Russia should withdraw its support for Assad after a
meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized economies also
attended by Middle East allies.

Some of Washington's allies had been wary of Trump, who spoke
during his election campaign of seeking closer ties with Moscow
and questioned the value of U.S. support for its traditional
friends. Tillerson's mission sees the Trump administration taking
on the traditional U.S. role as spokesman for a unified Western
position.

Trump's relations with Russia are also a domestic issue, as U.S.
intelligence agencies have accused Moscow of using computer
hacking to intervene in the election to help Trump win. The FBI
is investigating whether any Trump campaign figures colluded with
Moscow, which the White House denies.